Martina Monroe

Private Investigator Martina Monroe has no room for grief. Nearly a year after she failed to prevent her husband’s death, a battered woman depends on her for safety. But when she arrives too late and finds the female dead, the tormented detective’s only solace is a deeper relationship with the bottle. Struggling with sobriety and doing her job, Martina still has to protect another client battling a stalker. And if she doesn’t get her act together soon, one more victim may pay the price for her mistakes.

She’s on her last chance. When the bodies start piling up, she’ll need to save more than her job. Martina Monroe is a single bad day away from losing it all. Stuck catching insurance fraudsters and cheating spouses due to a DUI, the despondent PI yearns to return to more fulfilling gigs. So when a prospective client asks for her by name to identify an unknown infant in a family photo, she leaps at the opportunity and travels to the one place she swore never to go: Back home.

Back from break, PI Martina Monroe clears the air with her boss at Drakos Security & Investigations and is ready to jump right into solving cold cases for the CoCo County Sheriff’s Department. Diving into the cold case files Martina stumbles upon a pattern of missing young women, all of whom were deemed runaways, and the files froze with minimal detective work from the original investigators. The more Martina digs into the women’s last days the more shocking discoveries she makes.

PI Martina Monroe has found her groove working cold cases alongside Detective Hirsch at the CoCo County Sheriff’s Department. With a growing team of cold case detectives, Martina and Hirsch are on the heels of bringing justice for Julie DeSoto—a woman Martina failed to protect one year earlier. But when Martina receives a haunting request from her past, it nearly tears her in two.

In the thick of the current cold case investigation, PI Martina Monroe receives a hand-written letter from a desperate mother pleading for Martina and Hirsch to reopen the cold case of the woman’s missing daughter and five-year-old grandson. Feeling a deep connection to the request, Martina knows that Hirsch and she have found their next case.

Ten years earlier, two teenage girls were found murdered by what appeared to be a satanic sacrifice. The case had dominated the news headlines for months before the original investigators failed to arrest the perpetrators of the crime—despite multiple suspects. Without solid evidence to prosecute, and even with the near-heroic efforts of the original detectives, the homicide investigation turned cold. For years, the families of the two victims fought to keep the young women’s memory alive and to get the attention of law enforcement to not give up on finding those responsible.

Martina and Detective Hirsch, still reeling from their last high-profile case, agree to reopen the missing person case of Sadie Jarreau, a friend of one member of the Cold Case Squad. At first glance, Sadie’s disappearance from the local marina looks like the typical unhappy marriage resulting in a deadly end. But between the marina’s surveillance cameras malfunctioning that day, her husband’s air-tight alibi, and no one with a motive to harm Sadie, Martina and Hirsch are forced to consider a less common scenario - a stranger abduction.

Twenty years earlier, a set of female eighteen-year-old twins went missing in the Bay Area. There were no news reports or national coverage. The original investigators had barely touched the case, and like so many other cases of missing teens, were quickly labeled runaways, and the file sat on the shelf. Baffled by the lack of attention for the sisters, Martina insists it will be Hirsch and the Cold Case Squad’s next case.

PI Martina and Detective Hirsch accept the new sheriff’s request to reopen a ten-year-old serial killer case. Not that they could refuse. One victim was the sheriff’s brother, a married father of two. The case is strange. Someone has murdered three successful men within a six-month time period. There were no suspects and no motive. The only connection is their cause of death. The links are thin and the motive is unknown, but Martina and Hirsch know better than to ignore the similarities.

Five years on from the adrenaline-fueled days of the Cold Case Squad, PI Martina Monroe is now a managing partner at the renowned, Drakos Monroe Security & Investigations. She spends her days running the firm—a safe desk job—allowing her to spend more time with her sixteen-year-old daughter and less time in the line of fire. But her quiet life shatters when a meeting with the desperate parents of Katie Kimble, a young woman missing for two years, pulls her back into the fray.

With haunted eyes, a survivor steps into the offices of Drakos Monroe Security & Investigations, asking for Martina’s help. Thirty-five years earlier, Nancy made a harrowing escape from the clutches of a ruthless sex-trafficking syndicate in San Francisco, forced to leave her best friend Victoria behind. Clean and with a family of her own, Nancy hires Martina to find Victoria in a search for closure, justice, and the friend she lost so many years ago.

Detective Leslie, once a key figure in the Cold Case Squad, is convinced she’s closed the case on Darren, Martina’s brother, for a cold-blooded murder. But Martina, shaken by her brother’s guilty plea and an anonymous tip claiming his innocence, starts questioning the conviction. As Martina delves into the details, she encounters a series of unsettling discrepancies. The investigation’s weak foundation, coupled with the lack of physical evidence and a dubious motive, ignites Martina’s suspicions.

In Echoes of Her, the 12th installment of the Martina Monroe series, a maze of family secrets and shocking revelations unravel. By the time Kay was six, she had lost both her mother and sister. With only fuzzy memories of them, she had pleaded with her father since she was a little girl to tell her stories about them and to visit their graves. He claimed it was too painful to discuss, and refused—up until the day he died.